“Mariska Hargitay.” Say it aloud, softly and with reverence: “Mariska Hargitay.” Yes, it’s the name of the actress on Law and Order, but from the lips of Mike Myer’s newest creation, Guru Pitka, it’s a mantra, a blessing, and a joke that never stops giving.

I went to see The Love Guru with hackles raised and claws sharpened. I came to bury, not to praise. But 87 IQ-draining minutes of fart jokes, midget jokes, and sight gags (ever wanted to see someone literally have his head up his ass?) later, I came out slightly charmed, humming the Guru Pitka song and wishing my friend “Mariska Hargitay” every time he sneezed. Light-hearted, good-natured, and silly beyond belief, the movie might bore those who can’t easily access an inner 12-year-old, but for everyone else it’s well worth at least 5 demerits on the Hindu Janjagruti Samiti chart.

Mike Myers built a career playing outsized characters, goofiness masking the fact that world inhabited by those characters, the entire point of the parody, revolved around something actually not all that familiar to most Americans. Sprockets? How many Americans knew anything about West German Mimimalism, let alone enough to mock it? Wayne’s World? Brought GenX tropes and Slackers and cable access television to the mainstream in 1992. Austin Powers? It seems obvious now, but British 60s spy films weren’t on anyone’s cultural radar in the mid-90s.

So now that his new creation satirizes Hinduism, spirituality and the Guru-Shishya relationship, what will mainstream Americans make of it? How offensive is Guru Tugginmypudha?

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After seeing so much bad press on M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, I was beginning to get ready to not see it, to let it wait until DVD as I ended up doing with Lady in the Water (which was every bit as hokey as people said it would be).

In this case, the New York Times was just positive enough to keep me in my Shyamalan == opening weekend pattern, and I’m glad of it. I actually enjoyed the film. I did have my doubts about some of Shyamalan’s choices, and in the end the whole thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But some of the images Shyamalan put together in the film were genuinely, arrestingly creepy — I will probably remember the scene in Princeton for a long, long time. Finally, the conceit as a whole is, I have to say, strikingly original.

If you generally like Shyamlan, don’t let the reviewers’ piranha-like viciousness keep you away (especially since that viciousness is so easy: quite a number of people seem to be using the ready-made zinger, “‘The Happening’ Is Not Happening”). On the other hand if you hated Signs and The Village, you’ll probably hate this too.

I’m sure readers will have their opinions, and not all will be positive. Fire away (try to avoid spoilers, please).

Finally, the obligatory desi tidbit: The Happening was 50% financed by an Indian company, UTV. Though The Happening is not going to make anything like the kind of money Shyamalan made with his first three big films, it apparently has exceeded opening weekend expectations, despite the horrendous press. Which means, UTV and Fox will likely make their money back. Which means… Manoj Shyamalan probably isn’t going anywhere.

Trivia: Did you know that Shyamalan just came up with the middle name “Night” around the time he applied for college? The application wanted a middle initial, and he went with “N.” Gogol, all over again. Continue reading →

Periodically, we’ve heard about Bollywood actors starting blogs, usually in conjunction with the promotion of their latest film. I seem to remember Aamir Khan briefly blogging around the time of the release of the Mangal Pandey movie (he’s at it again). Bipasha Basu, too, briefly blogged, to promote Apaharan.

But now it seems like blogging superstar phenomenon is taking off, as Amitabh Bachchan has been blogging with relish for more than a month (via the BBC). There does seem to be some promotional element here, as the image you see when you enter the blog, of Big B, is from Ram Gopal Varma’s upcoming sequel to Sarkar, Sarkar Raj (I reviewed the original Sarkar here). But Amitabh Bachchan isn’t just doing it as a stunt; he seems to really relish the act of communicating directly with his fans, even if it sometimes leads to controversy.

In an early post, Amitabh Bachchan apparently referred to Shah Rukh Khan’s new TV game-show, Kya Aap Paachvi Pass Se Tez Hain? (“Are you smarter/faster than a fifth grader?”), as a “flop.” The comment caused a major uproar, leading to the following rather overwrought apology: Continue reading →

In their book Borders and Boundaries, editors Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin write: “As an event of shattering consequence, Partition retains its pre-eminence even today, despite two wars on our borders and wave after wave of communal violence. … Each new eruption of hostility or expression of difference swiftly recalls that bitter and divisive erosion of social relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and each episode of brutality is measured against what was experienced then.”

This statement speaks directly to the premise of Pakistani director Mehreen Jabar’s debut film Ramchand Pakistani, which recently premiered in NY at the Tribeca Film Festival. Based on a series of true events which took place in 2002—during a period where India and Pakistan were on the brink of war—it is the story of one innocent Hindu Dalit family which became a victim of the national hostilities that have permeated Indo-Pak relations since partition. The story begins in a small, dusty border village in on the Pakistan side of the Thar desert. Ramchand (Fazal Hussain) is the willful, naughty son of a Hindu Dalit farmer Shankar (Rashid Farooqi) and his wife Champa (played by Nandita Das). One morning, when Ramchand gets into an argument with his mother, he skips school and goes for a walk in the desert terrain bordering his father’s farm. Without realizing it, he crosses over into Indian territory. His father follows him to bring him back, but it’s too late. Indian patrol officers, suspicious of their motives (“Are you Pakistani spies?”) take both of them into custody.

For the next five years, Ramchand and his father are trapped in a bureaucratic prison system in India, where despite the lack of evidence that they did anything wrong, it is impossible to release them because of a longstanding battle of wills between the Indian and Pakistani governments. The film follows Ramchand’s coming of age in a prison where he and his father share a cell with Indians and Pakistanis, many of whom made the mistake of “crossing over” and have gotten lost in the shuffle. Continue reading →

Well, Cicatrix and Sandhya have given us much of quality to chew on today with their posts on Love Marriage, so leave it to the English professor to do a review of a gross-out comedy, the much-anticipated (well, by me) Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. The film opens nationwide this coming Friday, 4/25.

My wife and I saw the film for free — thanks to an invite to a press screening/sneak preview in downtown Philadelphia. (I know the serious journalists in the house must cringe every time a blogger gets thought of as equivalent to “press,” but oh well.)

My first thought is — I wouldn’t be surprised if the film opens at #1 in the U.S. box office over the coming weekend. I’ve been seeing quite a number of ads for the film on TV this past week, suggesting that New Line Cinema thinks the film will open big (bigger, anyway, than Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, four years ago. Bigger than Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Baby Mama? I’m not sure).

As for the film itself, there my response might be a bit more idiosyncratic.

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One of the things I miss most about living in Los Angeles is the IFFLA that takes place at the ArcLight in Hollywood every April. There was just something cool about being one of the first desi kids on the block to be able to see some smart films that are typically overshadowed by the usual Bollywood fare. Granted, there are a few flops but for the most part you can be pretty sure that you will walk away satisfied at having seen one or two memorable flicks. This year’s film festival is THIS WEEK, April 22nd to 27th.

As I pursued the line-up I noticed a few films I’d really like to check out if I was still there. The first one reminds me of my childhood vacation in Ahmedabad where I became a feared kite-killer over the course of several months, Under The Ahmedabad Sky. Eventually, my own kite, with dozens of confirmed kills, went down. I learned an important lesson that day. No matter how bad, powerful, or smart I am, there will be someone “more badder” to eventually take me down:

A short film written by comic Hari Kondabolu will be playing with a group of other shorts at the SFIAAFF film festival this weekend (Friday night and Sunday night), and readers in the Bay area might want to check it out. As you may remember, Sepia Mutiny posted on Hari’s aggressive brand of comedy earlier, in this post (also see Smithsonian Diamonds Exhibit — with a rather shocking epithet for the Queen of England).

Here is the short blurb on Manoj:

MANOJ is a short documentary about the life and remarkable success of Indian-born standup comedian, Manoj Krishnamurthy. Manoj’s use of South Asian stereotypes has led to a growing fan base across the United States and has placed him on the edge of greater stardom. However, this begs the following questions: What happens in America when you’ll do whatever it takes for a laugh? What if you don’t care?

The idea of the film is interesting — what if a performer actively and intentionally set out to exploit comic Indian stereotypes for all they’re worth? It reminds me, a bit, of Dave Chappelle’s own dilemma about whether his brand of comedy was subverting old racial humor, or in some sense perpetuating it. It’s also an issue that is in the air when discussing Kal Penn or Russell Peters.

No clips from the film are available online yet, but Hari was nice enough to email me a couple of snips of dialogue to give us a sense of what he’s after in Manoj:

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What do you do once Nam-e-sake is out and the DVD is long since released? Well, if you’re Kal Penn, you make Harold and Kumar Escape from Gitmo (link makes noise if you open it), but what about the rest of the cast?

Well, Mira Nair is bringing Irfan Khan along to a new project entitled (and I kid you not) Kosher Vegetarian:

The Namesake director Mira Nair is making another movie about intercultural relationships, this time between an Indian guy and a Jewish girl, played by Natalie Portman. In sort of a strange twist, Irfan Khan, who played the father in The Namesake, will play Natalie’s Gujarati boyfriend in the film, tentatively titled Kosher Vegetarian. [Link]

Meanwhile Tabu is opening a Bollywood acting school in London, something that sounds like a Kal Penn film in and of itself:

Bollywood stars Anupam Kher, Urmila Matondkar, Tabu and Boman Irani are opening a “Bollywood Acting School” in London, to train students for a career in Indian cinema. [Link]

I’m just picturing a class of very pasty folks diligently practicing the phrase “Arre o samba!” until they get it right. I imagine the fight instructors stand around saying, “No no no, that’s not nearly fake enough. Your punch needs to pass around 3 feet from his face from the proper Dishoom! Dishoom! fighting technique.”

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There is going to be a new Tarsem Singh movie, The Fall and here the trailer is funny, albeit for somewhat different reasons than The Love Guru:

There is sort of a S&M look here, which might be appealing if one is into that sort of thing… On the other hand, all the leather and stylized violence might also just come across as kind of kitschy and pompous — this is the kind of imagery that’s very, very easy to mock. Continue reading →