![]() ![]() Though aided by a background in theater, this admitted mimic-by-habit was perfectly suited to slip into a wide variety of Hollywood's multi-ethnic onscreen personas.īorn on Sept. ![]() With a pensive, studious face characterized by a combination of dark hair and full-browed eyes, the lanky Minghella was a practitioner of careful observation. Watch and weep.As a small boy hovering around big movie sets, actor Max Minghella got his first taste of filmmaking from the inside. And if you don’t listen, you leave us with no choice but to send backup. But please, stop casting people who don’t know the difference between Delhi and dengue… and looking eastward for talent doesn’t mean stopping at the Jersey shore. Stars here will cry, bitch and backstab for three minutes of screen time alongside Jessica Simpson. Look, the fact is we really want to be in American movies – it’s the great Bollywood dream. You could have at least played to his strengths: The man’s got so much hair he makes the Teen Werewolf look as smooth as Vin Diesel’s noggin. Just ask him to take off his shirt and bam! – Chewbacca. If you were doing a remake of Star Wars, however, he’d be perfect. Imagine Hugh Grant as an action hero – that’s how wrong that role was for Kapoor. Seeing him play that womanizing effete in Tom Cruise’s latest Mission Impossible adventure was a massive letdown. So was it wrong to have thought you’d do the same for us? Instead, you pick Anil Kapoor. So every time a drunken American frat boy says we sound like Apu from The Simpsons, we’re thinking, “Yes, and you sound like the unintelligible love child of Jar Jar Binks and Larry the Cable Guy.” Now, if we were making a movie about Americans, you’d want us to cast the best specimen available, like perhaps George Clooney or Denzel Washington. Besides, there’s a reason that all American movies today come with subtitles. Indians have talented tongues – it’s why we have the Kama Sutra and the best you’ve got is Snooki and her pregnancy. Most of us sound like you would if you opened your mouths and enunciated. The point is: the Indian accent can be a fairly neutral one (for the most part), a concept as alien to Americans as gun control. Remember a deliberately darkened British actor Max Minghella playing an Indian character in The Social Network? Not. This is, however, a shade better than casting a white guy as an Indian. If he was a radio jockey, people would think he looked as white as Jon Bon Jovi. Is it not enough that we’re stuck with ugly noses, too much hair and epic shortness? Did you have to go and make the way we speak as universally unsexy as Chris Farley in a string bikini, too? Take college flick Van Wilder: The dong jokes are funny and all, but it’s painful to watch Kal Penn trying so hard to (unsuccessfully) repress his American accent and put on an exaggerated Indian one. ![]() Not that we don’t have a sense of humour about these things, but hey, if the brown guy’s going to stick around, there are some things we’d like to set straight. No one is sheltered from Hollywood’s stereotypes: If Indians are smart and cheap, the Arabs are terrorists, and the Chinese old and kinda asshole-y. They seem to be either drug dealers or murderers – except, of course, for Sophia Vergara, whose jaw-dropping ta tas have carried Modern Family for three seasons. Apparently, though, we’re still either call centre employees, 7-Eleven owners or spiritual gurus – which was offensive at first, but now that we think about it, a much better deal than the Colombians have been getting. We’re overjoyed that the Indian man finally exists in your universe – even if it only took you 30 years to notice the brown dudes in your midst. ![]()
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