Roger Ebert has a thoughtful piece on the movie, as is this…

http://nwasianweekly.com/2008270028/film20082728.htm

Next time you see her please compliment her on one of the most unintentionally funny books I’ve ever read, the one caled Jasmine. The scene in which the terrorist who kills her family in India turns up in New York selling hot dogs five years later after she’s survived shipwreck, rape etc etc etc to become an American housewife had me hooting out loud. Pandering is the least of her comedy tricks.

Well, the guy is a Londoner so his Sylheti accent is meant to be anglo-accented.

That’s Christopher Simpson, who is of mixed African and Irish background. He’s in loads of British desi films and TV, including playing the Bengali twins in the Channel 4 version of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Parminder Nagra’s boyfriend in a boring ‘British-Indian’ adaptation of King Lear set in modern day London, so boring I forget the name of it.

Sign me up. Like a moth to a flame I went to watch this worthy waste of movie stock to see if it was any more worthy or maybe even better than the novel, and in as much as looking at pictures can sometimes be diverting, it at least had movement and shadows to pass the time.

The actor playing Karim had a very anglicized sylheti accent and i was curious and found out he’s not Asain but in fact an Irish guy. he did look authentic but i wondered why there wasn’t a local actor selected for this character like the daughter. I imagine the fact Nazneen had a sylheti dialect could be due to the fact she’s meant to have lived in Brick lane for years and it’s likely she’s picked up the accent as many people actually do pick up the slang when interacting with that communit even if they speak proper Bengali.

I do agree however the chase scene was a little bit over the top but it was a touching moment when she finds her daughter.

I won’t argue Khaled Hosseini. But Bharati Mukherjee’s main sin for many people seems to be that she isn’t pandering to the brown audience any longer. I think she (and quite a few of the rest of us) have moved on from “identity issues” as the main focus of South Asian writing. Her work has definitely moved off in other directions, but I’d hardly call it “pandering to Western readers,” since most of her later books don’t sell nearly as well as her earlier ones did. She’s just writing what she wants to write, that’s all. She’s even said as much to me personally.

I thought Brick Lane was terrible mainly because it didn’t bring anything new to the table at all. Others may feel differently, of course. But for me, there was no payoff for paying attention. So after a while I stopped.

and then wondered i u were being a bit jealous of monica ali…

but then really stopped and thought, ‘this book is so av! It’s vanilla, it’s lukewarm, it’s the Radiohead b sides that no one wants to buy but everyone will cos it’s meant to be good.’

definitely had the same reaction to the novel (and i fear the movie will be the same!) i feel like this lady whose blog i read who had done a short story writing workshop with jhumpa lahiri before she got her first book published, and who felt lahiri’s stories wouldn’t have much too them without the ‘exotic’ element to them. then, lahiri got the pulitzer, and she got….bitter.

That is a hilarious sentence, and I agree.

It didn’t even phase me that Shahana was bigger than Nazneen. It’s probably all that British food. The director said that the actress is actually from the East End.