Three things I liked: microreviews

The White Tiger: Jai’s nailed it, Aravind Adiga’s novel is solid. Corrosive first person voice is like Animal’s People. A howl of anger, Richard Wright’s Native Son transported to Delhi. For anyone who’s wondered how what life as Indian underclass, as part of the ‘Darkness,’ the opposite of India Shining, is really like. Tips on little scams employers and servants run on each other. First person eventually becomes tiresome — like listening to an interesting but long-winded narrator. It limits the language flourishes (for veracity) and the perspective (because a single narrator can’t see everything that happens). Some cool symbolism including Yama’s steed, a water buffalo, carrying carcasses to slaughter.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall: The Judd Apatow crew pops out another flick. Shallow but very funny. Mila Kunis is gorgeous and less annoying than in That ’70s Show. A very specific rom-com in a world of generic, focus-grouped ones — think Dracula puppet rock opera (!) Paul Rudd is hilarious as an amnesiac stoner surf instructor. Russell Brand hits it out of the park as your girlfriend’s cool new lover. Line about his tattoos, paraphrased: ‘That one’s [Tibetan] Buddhist, that one’s Hindu, that one’s Nordic. Those belief systems don’t even go together.’ Apatow flips movie history on its side with three shots of Jason Segel’s l0vestick and no female nudity.

Smart People: No desi connection, but of interest to those in academia — I saw this movie in Harvard Square, and there were lots of knowing laughs about bitchy campus politics. It’s the Sideways posse all over again. Damn funny, but bleaker than Sarah Marshall. Thomas Haden Church, looking like a leathery, older Ethan Hawke, has incredible, deadpan comic timing. Dennis Quaid as a Carnegie Mellon lit prof, Ellen Page from Juno. Quaid takes physical method acting to a new extreme, completely transforming his jockish frame into an awkward, peevish professor. Page is annoyingly twerpy as a Young Republican — her character is the unpleasant logical endpoint of her father Quaid’s curmudgeonliness. Sarah Jessica Parker is decent.