kfields-6

While I agree that much of this film rehashes a lot of old stereotypes and clichés, I didn't feel that the film did so mean-spiritedly or even without good intentions. Wasn't the moral of the story that all the stereotypes and harsh feelings toward recent immigrants were wrong? While there were points where some of the jokes or plot lines were a little hokey or clichéd and completely overdone (for the love of god, no more doctor/engineer jokes!), I thought the film had some moments of very subtle, very astute analysis on identity, race relations and negotiations of who is "cool" and who isn't. Granted, I'm watching this film for my master's thesis, so I'm looking for all of those subtle cues, but if you look closely, you can see there is a lot more going on in this film than FOB jokes.

That being said, the film isn't perfect. It gets really slow at points, and like I said, a lot of the jokes are completely run into the ground. However, I thought that Hari was such a sweet, likable character (he actually reminded me a lot of the main character in the movie "LOSER," which follows a pretty similar story line about a dorky mid-Westerner moving to New York for college), that he made the movie worth watching. Despite all this film's shortcomings, I'd rather watch it than American Desi (or a large number of the American Desi type films) any day. This is one of the few films of its type that didn't take a completely uncritical approach to "Indian" culture. This movie actually took some time to poke fun at itself.

In my opinion, this film got much closer to satire than pretty much everything else I've seen in its genre, and if you are looking for a film to watch within this genre, this is probably the best option at this point.