In August of 2008, “The Namesake” was featured in an outdoor film screening presented by the Queens Museum of Art. As an example of flawless storytelling and vivid imagery, “The Namesake” was a perfect cinematic event to accompany the museum’s permanent collection. The following is Roger Ebert’s review of this beautiful film. Read about the outdoor cinema event in our original blog post here.

“The Namesake” is Mira Nair’s ninth feature, and I suspect the one closest to her heart. It tells the story of a young couple who have an arranged marriage in Calcutta and move to New York, where they discover each other and their new country, and have two children. Then the story shifts to center on their son, while keeping them in the picture. Nair, born in India, educated at Harvard, married to a Ugandan, must have felt a resonance on every page of her source, the beloved novel by Jhumpa Lahiri.

The first meeting of the young woman Ashima (Tabu) and her proposed husband Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) is filmed with subtle charm. Her prospective mother-in-law warns her that life will be hard in New York, far from home friends, family, all she knows. “Won’t he be there?” she asks shyly, and the solemn Ashoke smiles, and their future is sealed. Her new husband is an aspiring architect, earning enough at first to afford only a low-rent flat in a marginal neighborhood, but America has its consolations: “In this country, the gas is on 24 hours a day!” he tells her.

Nair tenderly handles their first days of warily walking and talking around each other, and tentatively making love. It goes easier than it might have, because this is a marriage that was arranged between the right two people, and their respect and regard (and eventually deep love) only grow.

Along comes a son, Gogol (Kal Penn), and a daughter, Sonia (Sahira Nair, the director’s niece). Much is made of how Gogol got his name, which is not Indian or American but inspired by his father’s favorite author; as an adolescent the boy comes to hate it, and changes his name to Nikolai (or “Nicky”), Gogol’s own first name. But there is a reason for “Gogol,” and it has much importance for his father, who often mentions Gogol’s short story, “The Overcoat.” In that story, interestingly, the hero has a laughable name, which Gogol explains “happened quite as a case of necessity… it was utterly impossible to give him any other name.” How the American boy got his name becomes the stuff of family legend.

The movie concerns itself largely with being Indian and American at the same time. With making close ties with other Indian immigrants, sprinkling curry powder on the Rice Krispies, moving to a split-level suburban house, sending the children to college. Gogol, or Nicki, acquires a white girlfriend named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett), who apparently truly loves him but says the wrong things during a period of family mourning, so that Gogol shuts her out. Then he marries a Bengali girl named Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), who has grown much more sophisticated since he first met her years ago during negotiations between their parents. His sister daughter marries a nice white boy named Ben. “Times are changing,” Ashima philosophizes.

The culture gap is demonstrated when Gogol brings Maxine home to meet his parents, and warns her: “No kissing. No touching.” He has never even seen his own parents touch. But Maxine impulsively kisses his parents on their cheeks, and the earth does not move. They would prefer him to marry “a nice Bengali girl who makes somosas every Thursday,” as Moushumi describes herself, but the film reveals that the children of the second generation do not always follow the scripts of their parents.

The movie covers some 25 or 30 years, so it is episodic by nature. What holds it together are the subtle loving performances by Tabu and Khan, both Bollywoood stars. They never overplay, never spell out what can be said in a glance or a shrug, communicate great passion very quietly. As Gogol, Kal Penn is not a million miles removed from the character he played in “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” although he is a lot smarter. He is an angel until about 13, and then his parents, heaven help them, find they have given birth to an American teenager.

“The Namesake” tells a story that is the story of all immigrant groups in America: Parents of great daring arriving with dreams, children growing up in a way that makes them almost strangers, the old culture merging with the new. It has been said that all modern Russian literature came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat.” In the same way, all of us came out of the overcoat of this same immigrant experience.

Source: Robert Ebert. Read full review here: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071206/REVIEWS/71207001

In the summer of 2008, the Socrates Sculpture Park Outdoor Cinema festival in New York City featured artistic indie films in their outdoor movie events. The Socrates Outdoor Film series is known for featuring some of the lesser-known, yet high-quality films such as Duck Season, a critically acclaimed film from Mexico. The following is a review of Duck Season featured in New York Magazine. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor movie event here.

The low-budget Mexican charmer Duck Season centers on two lonely 14-year-old boys who spend every Sunday eating junk food and playing Xbox games by themselves in a smallish apartment in a faceless housing development. In movie terms, this is a limited, potentially suffocating setting, and the black-and-white film stock does little to liven it up. Yet in the hands of the writer-director, Fernando Eimbcke, such constricted space is infinitely subdividable. Now we’re watching the best friends—the taller and gawkier Flama (Daniel Miranda) and the curly-haired Moko (Diego Cataño)—as they bang on their controls and bombard each other with expletives; now we’re behind their heads, eyeballing the action figures that blast one another into porridge. Now we’re riveted by side-by-side tumblers, as Flama serially fills each with Coke while Moko dips his finger into the foam to prevent spillovers—a soda-pop-de-deux. The space is remarkably porous and unexpectedly accommodating to intruders: a 16-year-old neighbor, Rita (Danny Perea), who asks to use the oven to bake a cake, and a pizza deliveryman, Ulises (Enrique Arreola), who gets locked with the boys in a tug-of-war over payment. (He arrives eleven seconds later than the company guarantees—Flama and Moko open the door holding a stopwatch.) It’s all rather tense for a while. Ulises waits mulishly for his money; Rita’s cake burns; the boys’ indifference is oppressive. But what gradually descends over these four—and over the audience, too—is about the loveliest, most inspiring torpor imaginable.

The style and tempo—deadpan exchanges separated by black—evokes Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and the vacant expression of the boys recalls the nerdy anomie of this generation’s peculiar teen anthem, Napoleon Dynamite. There’s even a touch of The Breakfast Club in the way the characters finally connect. But I found Duck Season easier to love than any of those films—less visually straitjacketed than the first two, less grandiosely romantic than the third. The faces are beautifully fluid, the boys in that no-man’s-land between childhood and full-bore puberty; the girl with more awareness than both put together but limited in how she can apply it; and the pizza guy on the brink of discarding his youthful dreams—his mother having told him that “opportunities in life are like bullets in a shotgun” and that he has already fired his. The imminent divorce of Flama’s parents gives the movie a strong emotional undertow; the very apartment in which the film takes place is a battlefield. One possession in particular—an unremarkable painting of a duck taking flight—is the source of a bitter custody dispute, and here becomes an object of mystical contemplation.

Duck Season is a hangout movie, and not to be bruised with superlatives. The black and white isn’t meant to be show-offy, as in something like Good Night, and Good Luck; Eimbcke seems to have chosen this palette to make it harder for us to interpret what we see. He makes brilliant use of his budgetary limitations. Or it might be that his limitations mirror the characters’, and his imaginative leaps suggest a way out for them, too. The fullness of Duck Season is in direct proportion to its smallness; its modesty makes it bloom.

Source: “Los Space Invaders” By David Edelstein -New York Magazine. Read full review at: http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/16312/