Masala

Rating:
Summary: Fabulous, sharp satire
Review: I totally disagree with most of the reviewers here. This movie rocked. It's the funniest, sharpest, most misanthropic take on Indian-American culture I've ever seen. It's magical realist, it's got art school pretensions, it's got cheesy effects, but it's a hell of an achievement for a director who did it at age 21. I was in tears of laughter for most of the film. This is a vastly underappreciated nugget in this genre.

Rating:
Summary: great film!
Review: It's been ten years since I first saw this movie, and some of the imagery and humour has still stayed with me. Having grown up in Toronto and knowing the culture, this may have been one of the factors in understanding a lot of the humour--However, I do think this is a very accessible film, very funny and well worth the time. I think it captured the clash of cultural expectation very well, and it certainly blew apart a lot of stereotypes in both Indian and Canadian cultures. Great movie!

Rating:
Summary: Pretty awful, actually...
Review: This was one of the strangest and most poorly-conceived movies I've seen about Indian people anywhere. First of all, the Indian family was so inauthentic in the way it was composed/casted. The protagonist and his parents (the ones on the plane) looked completely southern Indian, while the rest of the family's culture was portrayed (somewhat strangely and unconvincingly, though) as typically northern Indian, especially the uncle, aunt, grandmother, and daughters. This may not be so apparent to non-Indian viewers, who may not be deeply aware of regional cultural, ethnic and racial differences within the vast Indian subcontinent, but to an Indian like myself the family's inauthenticity comes across very strongly. To provide an American parallel, it is as absurd as, say, showing an American family where half the members speak in a Texan drawl and the other half in a New York accent, or showing one brother as black and one as white! It seems to me that the filmmaker Srinivas Krishna, as a Canadian-born person of Indian ancestry, just does not know Indian culture (and its significant regional variations) well enough in order to make a culturally and sociologically accurate movie about Indian people (even about Indian emigres in Canada!). I don't know about Canadian culture well enough to judge whether or not the portrayal of white Canadians in the film was culturally accurate or not, but the portrayal of the Indian family was certainly quite peculiar...