Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon and Jonathon Rhys-Meyers, opens at theatres across the country today. Nair gave an interesting interview to the New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon this past week. Actually, some of Solomon’s questions are kind of stupid–but I will let you decide that for yourself.

Your new film, ”Vanity Fair,” is based not on the magazine but on the great English novel. Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, one of the most conniving heroines in literature. As someone once said of Becky, she is not just a social climber; she’s a mountaineer. Becky Sharp was a girl who bucked the system. She didn’t like the cards that society gave her. So she created her own deck, and created it at a time when a woman was supposed to sit still in a drawing room and hope a guy was going to come and propose. You grew up in India and set films like ”Salaam Bombay!” and ”Monsoon Wedding” there. Were you drawn to Thackeray because he was also born in India? When I was young, I spent summers in Calcutta and worked in political protest theater. And every morning, walking to my theater company, I would pass Thackeray’s bungalow. There is still a crooked board there saying, ”William Makepeace Thackeray was born here.” As an Indian citizen living in New York, do you see the U.S. as a force for good? No. Islamophobia has completely raged in the Western world since 9/11. Americans are only given one very biased point of view about the Islamic faith. You seem to be suggesting that Americans view all Muslims as terrorists. Living in New York, we never felt foreign. After 9/11, we felt foreign.

Click here to read the full NYT interview.

A review of the film from the San Francisco Chronicle can be found here, and here is a larger profile of Nair from MSNBC.

Incidentally, rumor has it that Mira Nair has been offerred to direct the next in the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Just want to make sure everyone sees Kal Penn’s reply to criticism of his film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. (Or at least a comment by someone posting a long, careful defense under his name.)

A final scene IÂ’d like to clarify is the “Bag of Weed Dream Sequence”, in which Kumar fantasizes about, falls in love with, and marries a giant bag of weed. In a bout of post-marital financial hardship and depression, Kumar slaps the weed, calls her a “bitch”, and then apologizes… everyone should know that the scene is a parody of (and shot almost exactly like) a very famous scene in the Robert DeNiro film, “Raging Bull”.

It’s much like my point of view, though I missed the Raging Bull reference:

[T]he bit about slapping a bag of weed is intended to make fun of Kumar and is anti-domestic violence. Kumar is in an undershirt in a slummy apartment, chest hair showing, drinking crummy coffee. It’s enlightened society saying that Archie Bunker-like abusers are uncool troglodytes.

This all was prompted by Abhi’s post quoting South Asian Sisters’ criticism:

Harold and Kumar disappointed us. They represented Asian American men as being homophobic, spineless, sex-crazed misogynists.

Kal Penn’s site now has a new link to the anti-domestic violence org Narika and a page of links to progressive South Asian orgs.

Art film stud Rahul Bose’ new wave film Everybody Says I’m Fine returns to Manhattan at the Pioneer Theater from Sep. 1-8. The film, a thriller in English about a mind-reading hairdresser in Bombay, stars Bose (Mr. and Mrs. Iyer) and British desi Koel Purie (American Daylight, Road to Ladakh). Upper Stall pointed out why the film is innovative, part of a flowering of increasingly sophisticated Indian cinema which includes Dil Chahta Hai and Yuva:

ESIF is most unlike any other commercially made English film in India… The film is not intended for an international (read festival) audience. It is for English speaking Indians… Bose is certainly not trying to sell India with a typical portrayal of a kind of Indianess from a Western perspective… There is no deliberate indulgence in trying to woo a “crossover audience” (whatever that is.) It’s a good story to tell. And Bose has just happened to do it in English.

As usual, the New York Times didn’t grok it. Continue reading →

Gurinder Chadha, director as everyone should now know of Bend it Like Beckham and the forthcoming Bride and Prejudice spoke to recently spoke to rediff.com about her recently completed film.

How would you define Bride And Prejudice? It is a British film made by British finance, obviously because I am British. But it is a homage to Hindi cinema and to Hollywood musicals. My friends in the West, who have seen it, have compared it to Grease. They don’t know the musical references from Hindi films. There are very deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar. Do you think post-Bend It, Bride And Prejudice might be over-sold to the public? I don’t think so. I know audiences will go to the theatres with a lot of expectations. But they will enjoy it. I don’t think it will be a huge 100-week ‘House Full’ film in India because it’s in English…What I hope to do with Bride And Prejudice is make the Hindi language familiar to the world. After all, Bollywood is much bigger than Hollywood. Hopefully, it will work both ways. It will spur Westerners to watch more Hindi movies and also inspire Bollywood filmmakers towards better narratives.

Click here to read the full interview.

The film opens in India and the UK on October 8th, and during the very busy Christmas movie season in the states.

Incidentally, it is quite amazing to flip on my cable, and in one channel sweep find Monsoon Wedding on IFC, Bend it Like Beckham on HBO, and commercials for Mira Nair’s forthcoming Vanity Fair throughout. From eating chilled monkey brains and snake surprise to this. How far Desis have come! Continue reading →

if scary movies are your bag, baby, be sure to check out the latest film starring Krishna Banji (aka ben kingsley):

Kingsley’s presence in “Suspect Zero” tells us it must be one of those brainy serial-killer movies in which the killer is much smarter than the FBI agent who has been hired to track him…”Who’s the pursuer and who’s the prey?” we ask ourselves, thoughtfully tugging our beards (imaginary or real) as we observe the agent-killer tête-à-tête and ponder the gnarled, twisted roots of humanity.

…”Suspect Zero” was directed by E. Elias Merhige, who previously made the inscrutable “Shadow of the Vampire.”…Kingsley plays Benjamin O’Ryan, a serial killer: That’s not a spoiler, since we know he’s a lunatic in his first scene. (When he makes his entrance, Merhige shoots him upside down, in the rain, so the drops drip upward from a door frame — please don’t bump your head on the symbolism on your way out.) Kingsley does lots of silent-movie eye-flashing in this picture — he’s monstrously good at it, too.

via Salon.

i think that “pather panchali” was the greatest film to come out of india, ever. yesterday marked the fiftieth anniversary of its premiere:

KOLKATA: It was May 3, 1955. The debut film of one Satyajit Ray opened a week-long festival at New York’s MOMA. On August 26 the same year, Pather Panchali opened to Indian audiences at Basusree.

And, in a near-repeat of the phenomenon, four months after Cannes conferred an award on it, the film won the President’s Gold. That prompted the 35-year-old Ray to give up a handsome monthly salary of Rs 1,013 and shoot the sequel, Aparajito. And it changed the face of Indian cinema.

As the film steps into its 50th year, it’s time for flashbacks…

…Soumitra Chatterjee saw it the next day, “and was stupefied.” Till then, he’d weigh every Bengali film against How Green Was My Valley, or Bicycle Thieves. So disappointment was inevitable.

Pather Panchali dispelled that, “it spelled hope for Indian cinema. No, we’d not seen anything like it,” the actor repeats. “Aparajito, Jalsaghar, Charulata were better crafted, but the raw emotion of Pather Panchali has no parallel.”

The troubled relationship between desis and camp:

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Given the number of desi engineers, you’d think the Trekkie quotient would be through the roof, but desis have never been strong with knowing campiness. Irony is the forte of post-materialist, post-sexual revolution societies… Unintentionally camp, now, that’s different: guys with bad haircuts and thick plastic civil service specs; aging, tubby icons romancing young lovelies; Indian Superman. The legion of desi camp could overrun a big tent party and still leave badly-shirted henchmen mewling at the gates.

More here.

Playboy prints way too much information about Kal Penn’s sex life (via Gene Expression). Plus, a bong-arific R-rated trailer with a very Opie, ‘vintage’ anti-pot ad and Mr. Modi’s naked bum. Continue reading →